Our first morning!

All three of my men here slept in until almost 8:30. I was awake at 6:00.  Still keep waking early, but it is alright. Thank you to my friend who instead of praying I would sleep later, prayed for those quiet hours.  In the quiet this morning, I was overwhelmed pondering our day yesterday.  God has been so gracious to us.   Joshua did very well yesterday. He had tried to tell us, through our guide, that he wanted to go for more chicken for dinner. We told him we would go back for lunch today. I can't remember if I posted about how he dipped everything at lunch yesterday - fries and chicken nuggets into sauce, chocolate sunday, ketchup - all at once. Last night, we went to the chinese restaurant here in the hotel.  We are getting pretty good using a combination of charades and some notes from our guide -- although somehow bottled water seemed to be translated - sprite.  That was better than the previous evening when we got hot steamy water in glasses - then got sprite, to which they later added hot water...   He wasn't sure what he thought of the cooked broccoli that came first - but after giving it a sniff, decided to try it.  He took the sprite, poured it into a teacup and started dipping everything in the sprite - peanuts, the broccoli, chicken kabobs.  We'll have to work on that later, but then again, we don't usually have sprite with dinner. At least he ate a pile of broccoli - something fairly healthy!  We arrived when the restaurant opened at 7:00, so we were the only people there to entertain the staff.   When he was done eating, he became very quiet. I wasn't sure if he was overly full, overly tired or starting to feel a bit sad. We headed back to the room and put in Finding Nemo because I had heard other people say that their children enjoyed it even when they couldn't at first understand it.  He watch for a while, then went and sat on his bed looking very sad and serious.  I had dozed off just before that happened and awoke to hearing Pete ask if he was alright. He tried to say something that Pete couldn't understand and we could see he was feeling sad.   What a helpless feeling to see your son feeling sad and have no words to communicate. All I could do was pray for direction.  Pete sat in front of him and I sat next to him. I grabbed the blanket Sarah had made for him and wrapped it around his shoulders and just snuggled him.  We could see he was trying to be brave as a few tears slipped from his eyes. We just held him and spoke gently to him for a while.  He was very quiet, but he let us hold him that way.  After a while, we tried just using our pocket translator to translate some words -- he didn't seem to respond to that.  Then, I remembered how much he had enjoyed pictures and found the little photo album I had brought with some pictures of family.  I pulled that out and he really enjoyed looking at it.  We then decided it was late enough in the morning back home to make some phone calls.  We showed him pictures of Pete's parents first and called and got his mom.  We showed Joshua the pictures, he recognized her saying "hello Li Meng " we then got Sarah up and on the phone - showed him her picture and the blanket.  He had a big smile when she said "Ni Hao Li Meng".  We got all of the kids up then to say hello.  He got the idea and came over to say "Ni Hao" to them.  We called Rachel at the Bennetts and called my parents. My sister is visiting them now, so we got her too.  He clearly seemed to understand who we were calling and it was just what he needed.  Before we were done talking to everyone, he and Mark and crawled into their beds and fell asleep.   The boys are up now and playing with cars.  Joshua is doing a lot of chattering.  He wanted to wear the same shirt that matched Mark from yesterday.  The first thing he did this morning was find his pendant to wear.  We couldn't get him to take it off until he was ready to sleep last night. I'm so glad we got that for him. Someday, he will understand the verse on it from Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and courageous. Do not be terrified, do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go." Our family has had these pendants for 2 or 3 years.  It is still amazing to me that it wasn't until the day after we chose the name Joshua that I remembered the verse on the pendant...    He has given us great big nice hugs this morning - I made it through yesterday without tears, but this morning I've had them several times...